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Active systems contain self-propelled particles and can spontaneously self-organize into patterns making them attractive candidates for the self-assembly of smart soft materials. One key limitation of our present understanding of these materials hinges on the complexity of the microscopic mechanisms driving its components forward. Here, by combining experiments, analytical theory and simulations we explore such a mechanism for a class of active system, modular microswimmers, which self-assemble from colloids and ion-exchange resins on charged substrates. Our results unveil the self-assembly processes and the working mechanism of the ion-exchange driven motors underlying modular microswimmers, which have so far been illusive, even qualitatively. We apply these motors to show that modular microswimmers can circumvent corners in complex environments and move uphill. Our work closes a central knowledge gap in modular microswimmers and provides a facile route to extract mechanical energy from ion-exchange processes.
DNA is an ideal candidate to organize matter on the nanoscale, primarily due to the specificity and complexity of DNA based interactions. Recent advances in this direction include the self-assembly of colloidal crystals using DNA grafted particles. I
Electrostatic interactions play an important role in numerous self-assembly phenomena, including colloidal aggregation. Although colloids typically have a dielectric constant that differs from the surrounding solvent, the effective interactions that
We derive a model describing spatio-temporal organization of an array of microtubules interacting via molecular motors. Starting from a stochastic model of inelastic polar rods with a generic anisotropic interaction kernel we obtain a set of equation
We report an experimental study on ion-exchange based modular micro-swimmers in low-salt water. Cationic ion-exchange particles and passive cargo particles assemble into self-propelling complexes, showing self-propulsion at speeds of several microns
The protein shells, or capsids, of all sphere-like viruses adopt icosahedral symmetry. In the present paper we propose a statistical thermodynamic model for viral self-assembly. We find that icosahedral symmetry is not expected for viral capsids cons